50% of Black Friday shoppers prefer to buy online this year

Figures from the Black Friday sales reveal that more shoppers are opting for eCommerce as the same number of customers are buying on physical stores as from online stores.

Retail stores sales went down to $10.4 billion in this year's Black Friday from last year's $11.6 billion, according to figures from ShopperTrak, which has 1,200 members consisting of US and foreign malls and retailers. Meanwhile, Thanksgiving sales also went down to only $1.8 billion from over $2 billion. According to a report from WANE, the decline of shoppers is mainly due to online shopping.

Meanwhile, The New York Times has reported that EBay was selling a couple of hoverboards every minute in Black Friday. Walmart sold 3,000 movies and most were sold online. Shoppers spent $1.73 billion on eCommerce sales on Thursday, a 22 percent increase from last year, according to Adobe, which tracks 4,500 retail websites in the United States with 180 million visitors. Most of these transactions were done on mobile devices.

Re/Code gave four major takeaways from these reports. First is that Americans do a lot of online shopping after they eat the turkey on Thanksgiving. According to Adobe, thanksgiving online sales increased 25 percent this year; while Black Friday had a 14 percent increase. Second is half of the people who shopped online did so on their mobile phones.

However, conversion rates on mobile phones are still a big challenge with only two out of 100 visitors to a mobile shopping website making a purchase. The first company to give a solution to this problem is Amazon, which has a one-click buying and shopping sites for mobile phone buyers.

Finally, big and small companies alike are suffering from overwhelming web traffic surges. Walmart was hit the most in 2013. Last year was Best Buy, and this year its NeimanMarcus.com that was hit the most last Friday.